Sunday, January 4, 2009

In full edit mode...

Now that Leaden Skies is off with my publisher (the wonderful Poisoned Pen Press), I'm turning about 90% of my writing/editing focus on projects under contract (the other 10% being reserved for blogs, email, Facebook——which I'm still learning——and such).

I'm editing a nonfiction ms right now and have become quite obsessed. Obsession is necessary, when in full copyedit mode. I'm merciless with dangling participles, subject-verb agreement, anarchic capitalization, questionable italics and quotemarks, so on and so forth. My 15th Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is getting a workout.

And here's a photo for the season, taken by ice-climber William McConachie. It's the Sierras, not the Rockies, but I can dream... And look at those leaden skies!

Good luck with your editing, Ann, and congrats on Morgan's "Your blog is Fabulous Award"! I felt like I spent all last year editing various projects, and writing a brand-spanking-new short story is how I'm celebrating the new year. We got 8 inches of snow yesterday here in the foothills of Colorado Springs, BTW.

Whoops! See what happens when I get caught up in things and time slides by??I feel like I just walked into a party at the eleventh hour . . . and it's at MY house! :-}Thank you, Morgan. I'm heading over to check out your blog. Hmmm. I'm wondering now how to respond to everyone in short order.Hey, Dani, I'm a shameless indulger in ellipses. And sentence fragments. I love (love! love!) redundant punctuation. Carefully used.And thanks, all, for the nice words on the photo. I'm trying to get this McConachie fellow to set up a "photo blog." Let's see if I can convince him after he sees the lovely comments about his work.

Hello Bob!I just had to click on your photo to get a closer look at the image. Lovely colors. Is it the cover to your book?Anyhow, in answer to your question (and I see you are a fellow technical writer! ---secret handshake follows here--- ), different projects have different style guides. Where one isn't specified, I tend to go with Chicago (since it's most widely used. Well, seems to be, anyway). I do keep a running list of styles on a given project, when they prove problematic.